What is the difference between male fitness and muscle gain

When I first entered the gym, I thought the two things were the same thing. It took me almost five years of training to figure out that the two are essentially about the relationship between inclusion and being included - all active training done by men to improve physical condition, improve sports performance or adjust appearance can be regarded as fitness, while muscle gain is just a vertical branch of the fitness track with clear muscle hypertrophy and increasing lean body mass as the core goals, and it is not the same thing at all.

Let’s take the post-95s operation and maintenance guy in our company. He runs around the Olympic Stadium twice after get off work every day, meets up with friends to play soccer on the weekends, and occasionally works out at the gym, depending on his mood. After practice, he goes straight to the barbecue stall to make two skewers of pork belly. This is a typical ordinary fitness. His goal is to relieve stress and avoid fatty liver disease at a young age.

If it were my young boy who was preparing for the competition, let alone lifting irons depending on his mood, he would have to calculate the fat content in the pot before having a hot pot date with friends on the weekend. If he couldn't push it away, he would just rinse it with boiled vegetables and add chicken breasts. During training, the eccentric time of each set of bench presses would be stuck at 2 seconds, and the eccentric time of each set would be stuck at 2 seconds. It doesn’t take more than a minute and a half or more. Measuring body fat and arm circumference at a fixed time every week. If the lean body mass does not increase for two consecutive weeks, the training plan and diet chart must be overturned and adjusted on the same day. This is the standard muscle-building state. The goal is extremely clear. All actions are in the service of "growing muscles."

The two opinions that are making a lot of noise on the Internet are actually quite one-sided. A group of novices who have just practiced to build muscle for half a year and have an arm circumference of just over 35 always shout that "fitness that does not focus on weights and does not build muscle is just nonsense training." Going to the gym to grow muscles is a waste of money; on the other side are people who only do aerobics all year round and have never even touched a dumbbell. They say "all muscle building exercises are dead muscles, useless" and feel that high muscle mass will only hinder flexibility. In fact, there is no need to argue. They are just different goal choices. If you are working out just to climb the fifth floor without panting and have normal physical examination indicators every year, there is no need to suffer the sin of muscle gain. If you just like to wear a T-shirt to straighten your shoulders and have lines when you take off your clothes, there is nothing wrong with you according to the standards of muscle gain. How can you be superior or inferior?

Another intuitive feeling is that the error tolerance rates between the two are completely different. In ordinary fitness, if you are lazy and don't practice for half a month, you will be out of breath after running for two laps at most, and you will recover after two days of rest. If you stop for a week during the muscle-building period and then eat a few random meals, the muscles you have worked so hard to save may not be preserved, and your body fat will increase first, and half a month of hard work will be wasted. To put it bluntly, it's like playing an open-world game. Fitness means you wander around casually, do tasks, see the scenery, and enjoy the scenery. Muscle-building means you specifically choose the upgrade branch of the hard mode. All operations are aimed at leveling up. There are many rules and low error tolerance. Of course, the sense of accomplishment after completing the game is much stronger.